10.1 The 4 R’s

Chapters 9-12 follow the series of steps Nehemiah and Ezra led the people through in order to honor God for the mighty work He had done through them. They provide a picture of the steps we should take anytime we fall in our efforts to maintain our sexual purity. These four R’s will help you get back into the fight.

Chapter 9 – Repent

On the twenty-fourth day of the same month, the Israelites gathered together, fasting and wearing sackcloth and having dust on their heads. Those of Israelite descent had separated themselves from all foreigners. They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the wickedness of their fathers. They stood where they were and read from the Book of the Law of the LORD their God for a quarter of the day, and spent another quarter in confession and in worshiping the LORD their God.

(Nehemiah 9:1-3)

Following the joyful celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, the people came together for a time of repentance. They humbled themselves before God by fasting, wearing sackcloth (a comfy material made of coarse goat hair) and throwing dust on themselves. These practices were to show their complete poverty of spirit before the Lord. In this state, they confessed their sins and the sins of those who came before them. Then they stood for three hours while the Word was opened and read aloud. Those three hours were followed by three more hours in more confession and worship. In other words, they were serious.

And they aren’t done. The rest of Chapter 9 includes Ezra’s prayer, the longest recorded prayer in Scripture.¹ When I grow up, I want to pray like that! Ezra doesn’t rush through his wish list so he can hurry and get on with his day. He puts the focus on God. First, he recounts the greatness of God (verse 6). Then, he remembers the goodness of God (verses 7-30). He finishes with the grace of God (verses 31-38).² In the whole thing, he only makes one request:

“Now therefore, O our God, the great, mighty and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love, do not let all this hardship seem trifling in your eyes—the hardship that has come upon us, upon our kings and leaders, upon our priests and prophets, upon our fathers and all your people, from the days of the kings of Assyria until today.” (Nehemiah 9:32)

That’s not to say that this prayer is the model for all prayer. It’s not. God isn’t looking for us to ignore our needs. He wants to hear them. What makes this prayer remarkable is the context. This was a time of repentance for the Jews. They are turning from the sins of the past back toward their great, good, gracious God. Ezra is also laying the foundation for the second “R,” – Recommit. He’s making sure everyone knows why they are about to make the commitments they are about to make.

The message of Chapter 9 is Repent. When you’ve turned away from the Lord through your sin, turn back. No matter how far you’ve gone in the wrong direction, He’s right where He was when you left Him. With humble spirit, repent. Acknowledge that God has always been great and good and gracious. Then, Recommit.

6.6 Why Did God Make Us This Way?

If sexual purity is so important, why did God give us such a strong sex drive? How come we are so visually-oriented? Why do we want sex as much as we do?

After all, when someone has an addiction to alcohol or drugs or cigarettes, he can quit it for good. Sex isn’t like that. Married men with a sexual addiction can’t abstain from sex for the rest of their lives. Their bodies are not their own, and they have a responsibility to keep their marriage healthy through physical oneness. While single men can abstain from sex, they still have to contend with the 72-hour cycle of semen build-up. Imagine giving up heroine but still having to resist a compulsion given by God to shoot up every 72 hours for the rest of your life.

It seems incredibly unfair. Was God setting us up for failure? I thought it was, “lead us not into temptation.”

By way of answer, let’s first separate what God has done, and what we have done.

God gave us a drive for sex for several important reasons:

a) Attraction – Our sex drive helps us to select a wife. Of course, this is not the primary criteria for compatibility, but it does get our attention.

b) Procreation – The command is to “multiply and fill the earth.” Our sex drive compels us toward our wives to fulfill it.

So far, these are the same reasons that God gave a sex drive to animals. The next reason He gave to us alone.

c) Oneness – as Paul has said, this is a mystery. I don’t completely get it, but oneness in marriage is designed to help us understand our oneness with God. How does our sex drive help us gain oneness in our marriage?

a. It causes us to become one physically. (This we get.)

b. It compels us to initiate. As husbands, we are to lead in the area of sex in our marriage. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what is going on in our relationships with our wives – we still want sex. We could have just had a terrible fight, but the sight of our wives undressing will get us in the mood. While our wives may not understand this and may even be insulted by it, our ability to switch gears so quickly serves a purpose. The fight suddenly gains its proper perspective in the context of our relationship. Often, we are able to set aside our pride and apologize to mend the relationship.

c. It keeps us humble. God made men strong in many ways with the ability to operate independently, but we are not designed to be completely self-sufficient. We need our wives to meet our sexual needs, and physical intimacy is the key to our vulnerability. Our hearts are never more open than they are after sex (provided we don’t fall asleep, of course).

Sex motivates us to make changes. We will do the dishes if it speaks our wives’ love language. We’ll replace all the light bulbs, do the laundry, put the kids to bed, get the oil changed in the car…whatever!

That’s what God has done. What we have done is pervert what God intended. We have fed on a steady diet of ungodly images, text and sounds, increasing our sexual appetites in the process. We’ve trained our brains to think of women as objects rather than people. We’ve made our wives compete against other women and other images.

Sure, it’s difficult to reserve our attention for our wives alone. Our physical urges and the temptations with which we are faced daily are formidable. But as Stephen Arterburn & Fred Stoeker say in their book Everyman’s Battle, “We must choose to be more than male. We must choose manhood.” Being a man rather than just a male means doing what’s hard to honor God and our wives.